Voices in Urban Education
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Educating Newcomers
VUE Number 15, Spring 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Struggling to Open Doors and Minds
By William Celis III
William Celis III is an assistant professor of journalism at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California.
> Author's biography
Although immigrant children face uneven services and, sometimes, hostility, a school in San Antonio offers glimmers of hope.
At the start of the school year, Brentwood Middle School principal Gustavo M. Cordova stood before his 700 seventh- and eighth-graders, at least a third of whom are either immigrants or children of immigrants, and issued a challenge: Do your best, he told his working-class students on San Antonio's blue-collar West Side. I know you can do it because I did it, and I'm just like you. I'm an immigrant.
Not only is the thirty-eight-year-old Cordova an immigrant, born in Mexico City, but he entered the country as an illegal with his single mother. With the help of friends in Texas, mother and infant Gustavo made their way through Laredo customs and his mother replied "yes" when custom agents asked her if she was a U.S. citizen. Borders were more porous then than now; customs agents didn't even ask for proof of citizenship. They traveled as far as San Antonio, where she and her son became U.S. citizens, and Cordova earned a bachelor's degree, then a master's degree, en route to a career in public school administration.
New Challenges for Both Schools and Immigrant Students
Cordova's journey will be difficult to equal in the years ahead. Immigrant students who collectively bring with them the greatest diversity ever seen in schools also face the greatest set of challenges (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco 2001). New students face not only mandated federal and state testing, they also must struggle with uneven school services, and they will, in some instances, confront hostile schools and teachers.
In a Rancho Palos Verdes, California, elementary school, for example, a wing in which Spanish-language students are taught has been labeled "Tijuana Hill" by the school's White teachers; so stigmatized is the bilingual program at the school that some Latino teachers refuse to teach immigrant children. New York City schools struggle to accommodate their record numbers of Eastern European children and youth; Minneapolis-St. Paul, Milwaukee, and other upper Midwest cities scramble to find teachers and aides to teach their Hmong students; Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco confront an influx of Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean students; Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Antonio, and cities and towns in between enroll record numbers of Mexican and Central American immigrants (U.S. Dept. of Ed. 2006).
Growth in Numbers and Diversity of Immigrant Children
Whether immigrants are in the country legally or illegally, a soon-to-be released study by the Harvard Immigration Project (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco & Louie, forthcoming) suggests that the influence of newcomers and pressure on schools will only grow. One in every five children under the age of eighteen is now an immigrant or a child of immigrants; by 2040, that ratio will increase to one in every three. The same study found more than 190 countries are represented in New York City public schools, and more than ninety languages are spoken in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Some children come to school without being proficient in their native language, let alone English. And teaching immigrant students both English and content areas remains a challenge.
Academic Challenges
No matter how the statistics are framed, the enormous numbers are accompanied by matching problems. The Harvard study, for example, shows a decline in academic achievement for immigrant children and youth between the ages of nine and fourteen from China, Central America, Haiti, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic during the five years researchers studied the same sample of students. For high school-aged immigrant students, the academic challenges are deeper. Though they only comprise 8 percent of the U.S. high school population, foreign-born high school students account for nearly 25 percent of the U.S. high school dropouts (Fry 2005).
There are well-documented reasons for the academic listlessness. Some children come to school without being proficient in their native language, let alone English. And teaching immigrant students both English and content areas remains a challenge. Although much, though not all, of the edge in the argument over bilingual education has ebbed in recent years, if for no other reason than because it is required by federal law and arguing about it is largely moot, this does not mean that all bilingual programs are well designed or engage the best teachers. Nor, as Samuel G. Freedman (2007) reported in the New York Times, does it mean that there are enough seats for immigrant students who need bilingual programs.
Brentwood: Despite Problems, Success
Despite these challenges, there are some success stories. San Antonio's Brentwood is an example of how a school with socio-economic data working against it can, in fact, succeed, even if it requires teacher Ericka Olivares to put on a linguistic gymnastics show every day and even if the success comes in tiny steps.
Some of the students in her eighth-grade social studies class are immigrant students for whom English is a second language. Other students are American born, but English is not the dominant home language. Then there are the students who can speak English fluently. Some of these students also speak impeccable Spanish. The class is studying pre-Civil War America, and Ms. Olivares, young and energetic, delivers the lesson in English to Spanish to English, as she moves about the room inspecting her students' work.
One boy, a Spanish-speaker, is stuck on a worksheet about Eli Whitney's cotton gin. In his language, Ms. Olivares coaxes him. He's still unable to produce the answer for himself until a deskmate leans over and, speaking in Spanish, reminds him what Ms. Olivares told the class a few minutes earlier about Whitney. "You were listening!" she beams. "Muy bien."
At the end of her class, as her students get ready for the lunch hour, she acknowledges that it is not easy teaching children with different language needs and language skills at different levels, and she's mindful that she has to keep the lesson moving at a good clip to keep everyone engaged. "It is," she says, "a challenge."
Her students do not disagree. One tall, thin boy doesn't speak Spanish and admits that it's difficult to follow Ms. Olivares when she does speak Spanish for the classmate who sits in front of him. Of her twenty-eight social studies students, about half require English instruction, the teacher says, either because they are immigrants or because the dominant language at home is not English.
"I think immigrant kids have an appreciation for and value education more than our kids who live in the U.S., especially recent immigrants because they know the struggle of everyday life of living in poverty in Mexico."
There are a variety of English-acquisition models in use today in the nation's schools, but researchers and teachers have long known that English learners absorb English faster if their native language is fully developed. In accordance with the blueprint used by Brentwood, as these students are learning English, they are taught core subjects like math, history, and science in their native tongue, eventually moving to all-English instruction by their third year.
Brentwood's approach has its critics, some of whom say the most effective way to teach English learners is by immersing them in English, entirely abandoning instruction in the native language. Other school systems use the English as a Second Language model, which may also include immersion but can also extend assistance in the student's native language. And so-called dual bilingual education programs attempt to make learners fluent in both languages.
But the research that strikes the strongest chord among many educators, backed by anecdotal evidence in classrooms like Ms. Olivares's eighth-grade class at Brentwood, indicates that the most effective way to teach English-limited students is by teaching them to read in both English and in their native tongue over the same time period, but at different times during the school day, according to Johns Hopkins researchers who studied the issue and reviewed three decades of studies scrutinizing English-language acquisition school programs (Edweek.org, nd; Slavin & Cheung 2003).
Parent Engagement
Principal Cordova is well aware that the world in which he grew up has rapidly changed, making his students' journey much more of a challenge. But the youthful-looking principal also knows firsthand what several studies over the years have suggested: "I think immigrant kids have an appreciation for and value education more than our kids who live in the U.S., especially recent immigrants because they know the struggle of everyday life of living in poverty in Mexico," says Cordova, who adds that his mother would remind him of the sacrifices she made so that he could have more opportunities (Rivera-Batiz 1997).
Immigrant parents also encourage their children, he says, knowing that free public education in America is one of the reasons many families risk their lives to enter the country illegally. Though immigrant parental involvement is spotty to nonexistent across the country because of deportation fears, on San Antonio's West Side, parents do participate at high levels at Brentwood. This may be one of the few times — perhaps the only time — when segregation actually benefits a school community because it's difficult to discern immigrants from Mexican Americans living in the sprawling working-class neighborhoods of bungalows and frame homes.
Using the Courts to Address Inequitable Funding
Brentwood's school district, the Edgewood Independent School District, an urban school system that encompasses 14.03 square miles, is significant in the national story for quality schools and quality programs for immigrants. In a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, Edgewood challenged the state of Texas over inequities in school funding, arguing that the state department of education discriminated against school systems like Edgewood and that poor schools should receive more aid to educate all their students, including the immigrant children and youth who do not speak English. The Supreme Court ruled against the Edgewood district in the case, asserting that the funding inequities did not violate the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection; this ruling was interpreted to suggest that funding inequities needed to be addressed at the state level.
Yet even this defeat turned out ultimately victorious. Parents from Edgewood who were, themselves, immigrants or first-generation Americans filed suit in state court and helped engender reform of school-aid formulas to reflect special-needs students like immigrants. Subsequent rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court also helped ensure that schools provide greater consideration to children of immigrants. In 1974, the year after Rodriguez, the Court, in Lau v. Nichols, established the right of English-learning children to be taught in their own language while they learned English. And in a 1982 case from Texas, Plyler v. Doe, the Court struck down a Texas law that allowed school districts to bar the children of illegal immigrants from enrolling in public schools.
Misconceptions about the Schooling of “Old” Immigrants
These court rulings, and the record of school and classroom practices in recent years, suggests that, as difficult as it may seem today, immigrant children at the turn of the twentieth century entered schools that were considerably less sensitive to their needs. “Children were thrown into classes where they were expected to learn English by osmosis; no one had ever heard of ‘English as a second language’ or ‘bilingual education,'” the author Susan Jacoby (1974) wrote three decades ago in one of the first pieces that chronicled the beginning of the modern immigrant movement.
In her essay, Jacoby compared the public schools that a young Gustavo Cordova, the Brentwood principal, would have attended to schools immigrants at the turn of the last century would have attended. “It was a sink-or-swim situation,” Marie Syrkin, who attended New York public schools when she was a new immigrant herself and taught other immigrant students between 1925 and 1948, told Jacoby. The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Syrkin says it is “nonsensical” to give the schools major credit for the success of some immigrant groups.
More Challenges Ahead
There is strong evidence to support Syrkin's viewpoint, Jacoby writes. The Jews and Chinese were the only “old” immigrants who made effective use of education in the first and second generations, she suggests. Most other immigrant groups concentrated on finding work and did not begin to take schooling seriously until their third and fourth generations in the United States — when education became closely related to job opportunities (Jacoby 1974). That tie is even more important today, a reality finally being recognized in the first decade of the twenty-first century by other leaders besides educators.
As difficult as it may seem today, immigrant children at the turn of the twentieth century entered schools that were considerably less sensitive to their needs.
But views like Romney's are often drowned out by a growing antiimmigrant chorus, which includes some one-time allies of immigrants. Former U.S. Representative Herman Badillo of New York, the first Puerto Rican elected to Congress, generated a maelstrom of protest in late 2006 when he suggested in his book One Nation, One Standard: An Ex-Liberal on How Hispanics Can Succeed Just Like Other Immigrant Groups that Hispanics do not value education the way other minority and racial groups do, principally Asian Americans. The former congressman's stance triggered a torrent of controversy and a backlash in Latino publications and Web sites; the debate rehashed many of the same pro and con arguments about bilingual education and assimilation. (Cortes 2006)
In such a climate, the offering of more services for immigrant students is unlikely. While elementary through middle-school students are covered by U.S. law, there are no such federal mandates to cover high school students; under federal law, public schools are only required to offer bilingual education through the sixth grade. The result has been an uneven patchwork of offerings for secondary students that often are weaker versions of K-6 curricula (Rumbaut & Portes 2001).
Principal Cordova isn't worried about how the rhetoric will impact his students, who, after all, live in a protective cocoon of a neighborhood in a city long comfortable with its immigrant roots and ties. But,
References
Cortes, R. M. 2006. “Herman Badillo Has a Plan,” NY Latino Journal (December 20).
> Available online
Edweek.org. nd. “English-Language Learners.” Edweek.org, Research Center.
> Available online (free with registration)
Freedman, S. 2007. “Some Immigrant High Schoolers Receive a Lesson in Disappointment,” New York Times (February 28).
> Available online ($)
Fry, R. 2005. The Higher Drop-Out Rate of Foreign-Born Teens: The Role of Schooling Abroad. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center.
> Available online
Jacoby, S. 1974. The New Americans: Immigration into the U.S. Washington, DC: Alicia Patterson Foundation.
Rivera-Batiz, F. L. 1997. The Education of Immigrant Children: The Case of New York City. New York: Institute for Urban and Minority Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.
Rumbaut, R. G., and A. Portes. 2001. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
> Description, ordering
Slavin, R. E., and A. Cheung. 2003. “Effective Reading Programs For English Language Learners: A Best-Evidence Synthesis.” Report no. 66. Baltimore: CRESPAR/Johns Hopkins University.
> Download PDF
Suárez-Orozco, C., and M. M. Suárez-Orozco. 2001. Children of Immigration. The Developing Child Series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
> Description, ordering
Suárez-Orozco, C., M. M. Suárez-Orozco, and V. S. M. Louie. Forthcoming. Moving Stories: The Educational Pathways of Immigrant Youth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Immigration Project.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education, Policy and Budget Development Staff. 2006. Teacher Shortage Areas Nationwide Listing: 1990-91 thru 2005-06. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Education.
> Available online (65 page word doc)
Archives
Educating Newcomers
VUE Number 15, Spring 2007
| VUE Home | Archives | Order Print Copy |
Struggling to Open Doors and Minds
By William Celis III
William Celis III is an assistant professor of journalism at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California.
> Author's biography
Although immigrant children face uneven services and, sometimes, hostility, a school in San Antonio offers glimmers of hope.
At the start of the school year, Brentwood Middle School principal Gustavo M. Cordova stood before his 700 seventh- and eighth-graders, at least a third of whom are either immigrants or children of immigrants, and issued a challenge: Do your best, he told his working-class students on San Antonio's blue-collar West Side. I know you can do it because I did it, and I'm just like you. I'm an immigrant.
Not only is the thirty-eight-year-old Cordova an immigrant, born in Mexico City, but he entered the country as an illegal with his single mother. With the help of friends in Texas, mother and infant Gustavo made their way through Laredo customs and his mother replied "yes" when custom agents asked her if she was a U.S. citizen. Borders were more porous then than now; customs agents didn't even ask for proof of citizenship. They traveled as far as San Antonio, where she and her son became U.S. citizens, and Cordova earned a bachelor's degree, then a master's degree, en route to a career in public school administration.
New Challenges for Both Schools and Immigrant Students
Cordova's journey will be difficult to equal in the years ahead. Immigrant students who collectively bring with them the greatest diversity ever seen in schools also face the greatest set of challenges (Suárez-Orozco & Suárez-Orozco 2001). New students face not only mandated federal and state testing, they also must struggle with uneven school services, and they will, in some instances, confront hostile schools and teachers.
In a Rancho Palos Verdes, California, elementary school, for example, a wing in which Spanish-language students are taught has been labeled "Tijuana Hill" by the school's White teachers; so stigmatized is the bilingual program at the school that some Latino teachers refuse to teach immigrant children. New York City schools struggle to accommodate their record numbers of Eastern European children and youth; Minneapolis-St. Paul, Milwaukee, and other upper Midwest cities scramble to find teachers and aides to teach their Hmong students; Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco confront an influx of Vietnamese, Chinese, and Korean students; Los Angeles, Phoenix, San Antonio, and cities and towns in between enroll record numbers of Mexican and Central American immigrants (U.S. Dept. of Ed. 2006).
Growth in Numbers and Diversity of Immigrant Children
Whether immigrants are in the country legally or illegally, a soon-to-be released study by the Harvard Immigration Project (Suárez-Orozco, Suárez-Orozco & Louie, forthcoming) suggests that the influence of newcomers and pressure on schools will only grow. One in every five children under the age of eighteen is now an immigrant or a child of immigrants; by 2040, that ratio will increase to one in every three. The same study found more than 190 countries are represented in New York City public schools, and more than ninety languages are spoken in the Los Angeles Unified School District.
Some children come to school without being proficient in their native language, let alone English. And teaching immigrant students both English and content areas remains a challenge.
Academic Challenges
No matter how the statistics are framed, the enormous numbers are accompanied by matching problems. The Harvard study, for example, shows a decline in academic achievement for immigrant children and youth between the ages of nine and fourteen from China, Central America, Haiti, Mexico, and the Dominican Republic during the five years researchers studied the same sample of students. For high school-aged immigrant students, the academic challenges are deeper. Though they only comprise 8 percent of the U.S. high school population, foreign-born high school students account for nearly 25 percent of the U.S. high school dropouts (Fry 2005).
There are well-documented reasons for the academic listlessness. Some children come to school without being proficient in their native language, let alone English. And teaching immigrant students both English and content areas remains a challenge. Although much, though not all, of the edge in the argument over bilingual education has ebbed in recent years, if for no other reason than because it is required by federal law and arguing about it is largely moot, this does not mean that all bilingual programs are well designed or engage the best teachers. Nor, as Samuel G. Freedman (2007) reported in the New York Times, does it mean that there are enough seats for immigrant students who need bilingual programs.
Brentwood: Despite Problems, Success
Despite these challenges, there are some success stories. San Antonio's Brentwood is an example of how a school with socio-economic data working against it can, in fact, succeed, even if it requires teacher Ericka Olivares to put on a linguistic gymnastics show every day and even if the success comes in tiny steps.
Some of the students in her eighth-grade social studies class are immigrant students for whom English is a second language. Other students are American born, but English is not the dominant home language. Then there are the students who can speak English fluently. Some of these students also speak impeccable Spanish. The class is studying pre-Civil War America, and Ms. Olivares, young and energetic, delivers the lesson in English to Spanish to English, as she moves about the room inspecting her students' work.
One boy, a Spanish-speaker, is stuck on a worksheet about Eli Whitney's cotton gin. In his language, Ms. Olivares coaxes him. He's still unable to produce the answer for himself until a deskmate leans over and, speaking in Spanish, reminds him what Ms. Olivares told the class a few minutes earlier about Whitney. "You were listening!" she beams. "Muy bien."
At the end of her class, as her students get ready for the lunch hour, she acknowledges that it is not easy teaching children with different language needs and language skills at different levels, and she's mindful that she has to keep the lesson moving at a good clip to keep everyone engaged. "It is," she says, "a challenge."
Her students do not disagree. One tall, thin boy doesn't speak Spanish and admits that it's difficult to follow Ms. Olivares when she does speak Spanish for the classmate who sits in front of him. Of her twenty-eight social studies students, about half require English instruction, the teacher says, either because they are immigrants or because the dominant language at home is not English.
"I think immigrant kids have an appreciation for and value education more than our kids who live in the U.S., especially recent immigrants because they know the struggle of everyday life of living in poverty in Mexico."
There are a variety of English-acquisition models in use today in the nation's schools, but researchers and teachers have long known that English learners absorb English faster if their native language is fully developed. In accordance with the blueprint used by Brentwood, as these students are learning English, they are taught core subjects like math, history, and science in their native tongue, eventually moving to all-English instruction by their third year.
Brentwood's approach has its critics, some of whom say the most effective way to teach English learners is by immersing them in English, entirely abandoning instruction in the native language. Other school systems use the English as a Second Language model, which may also include immersion but can also extend assistance in the student's native language. And so-called dual bilingual education programs attempt to make learners fluent in both languages.
But the research that strikes the strongest chord among many educators, backed by anecdotal evidence in classrooms like Ms. Olivares's eighth-grade class at Brentwood, indicates that the most effective way to teach English-limited students is by teaching them to read in both English and in their native tongue over the same time period, but at different times during the school day, according to Johns Hopkins researchers who studied the issue and reviewed three decades of studies scrutinizing English-language acquisition school programs (Edweek.org, nd; Slavin & Cheung 2003).
Parent Engagement
Principal Cordova is well aware that the world in which he grew up has rapidly changed, making his students' journey much more of a challenge. But the youthful-looking principal also knows firsthand what several studies over the years have suggested: "I think immigrant kids have an appreciation for and value education more than our kids who live in the U.S., especially recent immigrants because they know the struggle of everyday life of living in poverty in Mexico," says Cordova, who adds that his mother would remind him of the sacrifices she made so that he could have more opportunities (Rivera-Batiz 1997).
Immigrant parents also encourage their children, he says, knowing that free public education in America is one of the reasons many families risk their lives to enter the country illegally. Though immigrant parental involvement is spotty to nonexistent across the country because of deportation fears, on San Antonio's West Side, parents do participate at high levels at Brentwood. This may be one of the few times — perhaps the only time — when segregation actually benefits a school community because it's difficult to discern immigrants from Mexican Americans living in the sprawling working-class neighborhoods of bungalows and frame homes.
Using the Courts to Address Inequitable Funding
Brentwood's school district, the Edgewood Independent School District, an urban school system that encompasses 14.03 square miles, is significant in the national story for quality schools and quality programs for immigrants. In a 1973 U.S. Supreme Court case, San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, Edgewood challenged the state of Texas over inequities in school funding, arguing that the state department of education discriminated against school systems like Edgewood and that poor schools should receive more aid to educate all their students, including the immigrant children and youth who do not speak English. The Supreme Court ruled against the Edgewood district in the case, asserting that the funding inequities did not violate the U.S. Constitution's guarantee of equal protection; this ruling was interpreted to suggest that funding inequities needed to be addressed at the state level.
Yet even this defeat turned out ultimately victorious. Parents from Edgewood who were, themselves, immigrants or first-generation Americans filed suit in state court and helped engender reform of school-aid formulas to reflect special-needs students like immigrants. Subsequent rulings from the U.S. Supreme Court also helped ensure that schools provide greater consideration to children of immigrants. In 1974, the year after Rodriguez, the Court, in Lau v. Nichols, established the right of English-learning children to be taught in their own language while they learned English. And in a 1982 case from Texas, Plyler v. Doe, the Court struck down a Texas law that allowed school districts to bar the children of illegal immigrants from enrolling in public schools.
Misconceptions about the Schooling of “Old” Immigrants
These court rulings, and the record of school and classroom practices in recent years, suggests that, as difficult as it may seem today, immigrant children at the turn of the twentieth century entered schools that were considerably less sensitive to their needs. “Children were thrown into classes where they were expected to learn English by osmosis; no one had ever heard of ‘English as a second language’ or ‘bilingual education,'” the author Susan Jacoby (1974) wrote three decades ago in one of the first pieces that chronicled the beginning of the modern immigrant movement.
Everyone went to neighborhood elementary schools, and many youngsters — especially immigrants — attended schools that were as ethnically segregated as today's schools are racially segregated. Jews who packed the schools on Manhattan's Lower East Side learned English not through contact with native-born American classmates, but because English was the only language their teachers spoke in class.
In her essay, Jacoby compared the public schools that a young Gustavo Cordova, the Brentwood principal, would have attended to schools immigrants at the turn of the last century would have attended. “It was a sink-or-swim situation,” Marie Syrkin, who attended New York public schools when she was a new immigrant herself and taught other immigrant students between 1925 and 1948, told Jacoby. The daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants, Syrkin says it is “nonsensical” to give the schools major credit for the success of some immigrant groups.
The immigrants who did well in school were strongly motivated to succeed in that way. In the case of the Jews, it's a cliché that there was a strong emphasis on the value of education in the homes. Of course, the schools were there to be taken advantage of if you were able to do it — that was the big difference between America and the old country. But the fact is that most immigrant children didn't succeed in school at all. There was no such thing as remedial reading to help children who didn't catch on quickly. The teachers were not as well educated as they are today. Students didn't have access to paperback books the way they do now. So when people say, “Why can't the schools do for the blacks what they did for the immigrants?” I laugh. They should be transported in a time machine to a school on the Lower East Side in 1910, and see a bewildered child who knows only Yiddish or Russian listening to an Irish teacher talk about the Revolutionary War in English. The schools are trying much harder to accommodate differences today than they did when I was a student. (Jacoby 1974)
More Challenges Ahead
There is strong evidence to support Syrkin's viewpoint, Jacoby writes. The Jews and Chinese were the only “old” immigrants who made effective use of education in the first and second generations, she suggests. Most other immigrant groups concentrated on finding work and did not begin to take schooling seriously until their third and fourth generations in the United States — when education became closely related to job opportunities (Jacoby 1974). That tie is even more important today, a reality finally being recognized in the first decade of the twenty-first century by other leaders besides educators.
As difficult as it may seem today, immigrant children at the turn of the twentieth century entered schools that were considerably less sensitive to their needs.
But views like Romney's are often drowned out by a growing antiimmigrant chorus, which includes some one-time allies of immigrants. Former U.S. Representative Herman Badillo of New York, the first Puerto Rican elected to Congress, generated a maelstrom of protest in late 2006 when he suggested in his book One Nation, One Standard: An Ex-Liberal on How Hispanics Can Succeed Just Like Other Immigrant Groups that Hispanics do not value education the way other minority and racial groups do, principally Asian Americans. The former congressman's stance triggered a torrent of controversy and a backlash in Latino publications and Web sites; the debate rehashed many of the same pro and con arguments about bilingual education and assimilation. (Cortes 2006)
In such a climate, the offering of more services for immigrant students is unlikely. While elementary through middle-school students are covered by U.S. law, there are no such federal mandates to cover high school students; under federal law, public schools are only required to offer bilingual education through the sixth grade. The result has been an uneven patchwork of offerings for secondary students that often are weaker versions of K-6 curricula (Rumbaut & Portes 2001).
Principal Cordova isn't worried about how the rhetoric will impact his students, who, after all, live in a protective cocoon of a neighborhood in a city long comfortable with its immigrant roots and ties. But,
they will have more challenges than I did. I don't see problems as long we have them [in Brentwood]. But they will encounter the stereotyping in the educational and corporate worlds. After college, that's where they'll face the challenges.
References
Cortes, R. M. 2006. “Herman Badillo Has a Plan,” NY Latino Journal (December 20).
> Available online
Edweek.org. nd. “English-Language Learners.” Edweek.org, Research Center.
> Available online (free with registration)
Freedman, S. 2007. “Some Immigrant High Schoolers Receive a Lesson in Disappointment,” New York Times (February 28).
> Available online ($)
Fry, R. 2005. The Higher Drop-Out Rate of Foreign-Born Teens: The Role of Schooling Abroad. Washington, DC: Pew Hispanic Center.
> Available online
Jacoby, S. 1974. The New Americans: Immigration into the U.S. Washington, DC: Alicia Patterson Foundation.
Rivera-Batiz, F. L. 1997. The Education of Immigrant Children: The Case of New York City. New York: Institute for Urban and Minority Education, Teachers College, Columbia University.
Rumbaut, R. G., and A. Portes. 2001. Ethnicities: Children of Immigrants in America. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
> Description, ordering
Slavin, R. E., and A. Cheung. 2003. “Effective Reading Programs For English Language Learners: A Best-Evidence Synthesis.” Report no. 66. Baltimore: CRESPAR/Johns Hopkins University.
> Download PDF
Suárez-Orozco, C., and M. M. Suárez-Orozco. 2001. Children of Immigration. The Developing Child Series. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
> Description, ordering
Suárez-Orozco, C., M. M. Suárez-Orozco, and V. S. M. Louie. Forthcoming. Moving Stories: The Educational Pathways of Immigrant Youth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Immigration Project.
U.S. Department of Education, Office of Postsecondary Education, Policy and Budget Development Staff. 2006. Teacher Shortage Areas Nationwide Listing: 1990-91 thru 2005-06. Washington, DC: U.S. Dept. of Education.
> Available online (65 page word doc)
© all material AISR